Electricity

by Jim Reynolds

Electricity drives our modern lifestyle. It always surprises me how few people understand where electricity comes from and how it is generated. There are three fundamental ways to generate electrical power. One of these, photovoltaic cells, is still in its infancy. It converts sunlight directly into electricity when photons from the sun jar electrons loose in a semiconductor, such as silicon, creating an electrical current. Efficiency of that conversion is creeping upward suggesting that someday every rooftop will become an electrical generating station. Only a tiny fraction of our electricity is currently produced by photovoltaic cells.

The piezoelectric effect generates a tiny flow of electrons caused by changes in pressure on a crystalline or ceramic material. Quartz is an abundant and well known as piezoelectric material. Automobile airbag sensors are probably the best known common use of a piezoelectricity. It will probably never be a major player in the field of power generation, although some interesting applications are being tried. Footsteps on a piezoelectric floor in buildings that frequently host numerous people, such as airports, subway stations, and malls, could soon power lighting along their walkways.

The primary electrical generation method requires that either 1) a magnet be mechanically spun inside a wire coil or 2) a coil be set spinning around a magnet. When these occur, electrons in the wire are set into motion creating an electrical current. Almost all of our electricity is generated this way. Numerous ingenious techniques for spinning magnets or coils have been developed by a lot of clever people. Fossil fuel and nuclear power plants boil water into steam and force the steam to turn the blades of a turbine with its attached magnet. Water flowing under a dam spins a turbine. Geothermal plants use natural pressurized steam from within the planet to turn the blades. Wind, wave, tidal, and ocean current turbines extract natural energy to turn the magnet.

It’s all electricity but which is best? Let's look at electrical space heating. The goal is to bring air temperature up to a room temperature between 20º-22º C. Using coal-fired electricity, this requires that coal be extracted from the ground, often causing immediate, long-term environmental destruction. It is then transported, usually by rail, to a power plant where thousands of tons of it are burned daily at up to 1500º C so that it can heat water to 375º C where it flashes to high-pressure steam. Blasting the steam into a turbine generates the electricity that flows across the wires to your home heating unit where air is heated to 20º-22º C. In addition to being able to watch Deepwater Horizon petroleum spew into the ocean from the warmth of our living rooms, society is left with tons of toxic coal ash, air and water pollution, a degraded landscape, and an acidifying ocean. The countryside is shrouded with a toxic dusting of lethal chemicals, primarily mercury and cadmium, that was released along with the carbon dioxide that results from burning carbon. More than 3½ tons of CO₂ are released for every ton of carbon burned. The world burns more than 6.1 billion metric tons of coal each year to create steam: more than 16 million tons each day! After blowing the steam through a turbine, once, at ~35% thermodynamic efficiency, most waste heat is released into the atmosphere through cooling towers at the power plant. Although nuclear fuel avoids much of the water and air pollution, it demands a high level of security and leaves behind a lethal waste that needs to be closely guarded and monitored for the next million years. Few offer their backyards as storage sites. These are caveman approaches to generating electricity.

One might be led to conclude that electric heating is bad and should be banned. Not so! Think about that cold wind that pelted the country for most of January this year. That cold wind can turn a wind turbine, converting wind energy directly into electricity to heat your electric heater with only a fraction of the waste and virtually none of the environmental degradation. Deniers scream that wind power will kill birds and bats. How many birds and bats are killed by air pollution from coal-fired plants? or from flying into smokestacks? The body count in wind farms is well documented because these hapless critters fall where they get bonked. No body counts are made of air pollution-related deaths because air pollution kills anywhere that birds and bats breathe. The death toll is probably at least an order of magnitude higher than that in the wind farms. And that’s just birds and bats! When we account for the ill effects that generating electricity with coal has on all species living in the southeastern U.S., it becomes a massacre. This includes people. We know that in the southeastern United States, which has the worst regional air pollution in the country, there are thousands of premature human deaths each year that are directly related to air pollution.

Fossil fuels are our natural capital. There is no requirement that we use them all up and deny future generations use of these valuable, nonrenewable materials--and they are not renewable, except over geologic time. No one doubts that this conversion will happen. Thomas L. Friedman is fond of quoting a Saudi Arabian oil minister who said, “The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones.”

Naysayers and deniers claim that wind power is not economic—even though it is the fastest growing sector of our energy palette. I ask, “What the hell is so economic about heating water to 375º C so that air can be heated to 22º C?”

On top of that, who pays for the environmental cleanup and the destruction of our natural capital? We do! Through cleverly hidden subsidies to the nuclear and fossil fuel power industries, the clean-up is added our tax bill. If our electric bills reflected the true cost of using nuclear or coal-fired electricity, we would be screaming at Congress to lower our taxes by developing the renewable energy field as fast as possible. Some people ask “Why do they get away with this?” A growing chorus is asking a better question, “Why do we let them get away with this?” Dropping all fossil fuel subsidies as soon as possible should be a national goal.

The market will sort out which techniques are truly economical. The only reason nuclear and coal survive as power generators is through heavy government subsidies that serve to mask the true cost of our energy use. If we took away the subsidies, both nuclear and coal electrical generation would go the way of the buggy whip within years. Similarly, if we subsidized renewable energy at the same level as coal and nuclear, it would out-compete both coal and nuclear and drive them from the marketplace. Adding new subsidies is an expensive proposition; I prefer to drop existing subsidies to let market forces sort out the best course.

Guardians of the energy status quo also cry out to do away with government regulation and champion a free-market economy. Then they claim that converting to renewable energy will bankrupt our grandchildren’s future because we will need to pay too much to convert to renewables. These noble guardians cling to the present to offer us a decimated, poisoned landscape, ocean, and atmosphere as their vision of the future. Such logic reeks of short-sighted, self-serving profit and corruption. Who, in their right mind, would prefer a poisoned planet over a clean one?

Wall Street, for all of its ills, sees the writing on the wall. Nuclear power plants can only be constructed with government-backed loans because banks and investors know a poor risk when they see one. A similar, wholesale flight from fossil fuel-generated electricity is accelerating rapidly. Last year, the Environmental Defense Fund successfully argued down the construction of 100 coal-fired power plants by a Texas utility. The result: Texas is seeing a growth surge in renewable energy, particularly wind power. It recently passed Iowa and California as the leading renewable-energy producing state.

Following conservative principles into a green future is not an oxymoronic statement. All that is needed is to put conservation back into conservatism. Remember, Texas is the home state of our last president. He will never be remembered as a friend of clean, renewable energy but that’s what happened in Texas anyhow.

An earlier version of this essay appeared in The Clarion student newspaper, at Brevard College, Brevard, NC.